


Ordinary People

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Case Fic, Dark, Gang Rape, Gen, M/M, PTSD, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2008-07-17
Updated: 2008-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:56:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Youji always thought it would be the missions that did Weiss in, but peril lurks in unexpected places and sometimes, being seen as simply ordinary can be the most dangerous thing of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Coda

**Author's Note:**

> Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, it’s characters, indices, and everything else about it remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and Movic, as well as the individuals and groups who perpetrated the terrible US dub. I have time on my hands, a head full of twisted visions and believe that a decent psychological fic can be got out of this terrible staple plot, and have absolutely no notion of profiting from my strange fondness for angst and torment.
> 
> Author’s Notes: This is a sort of side project for me, based on a plotbunny that has been nagging at me for now and one of the oldest staple plots in the Weiss Kreuz fanficcer’s repertoire. It’s a combination of an (extremely) guilty pleasure and a genuine attempt to take an often gratuitous and somewhat overused plot angle, combine it with my fondness for angsting various Weiss members silly, and make it work in a way that is actually vaguely interesting to read. Only time will tell how well I succeed in this ambition. Please note that I have no planned update schedule – though I have plans and intend to finish the fic, it is a side project – and the chapter parts are intended to be of varying lengths. Some will be less than a page, others will span several. They’re just supposed to finish when they finish. Finally, the first couple of chapter parts may not seem like they have a lot to do with Weiss but trust me, they've been there all along...
> 
> Warnings: Bad language, violence, physical and psychological abuse, m/m gang rape (implied). If any or all of the above offend you then please, please read no further. Thank you

Somehow, it felt like falling.

Blue. Powder blue, sky blue, the kind of blue that mothers dressed their baby boys in. Innocent pale blue on a storm-grey background: a scrap of fabric caught on the edge of a broken shelf, all snap and rustle in the sudden breeze. There was nothing to hear but the leftover noise of the city, the rumble and murmur of traffic, the sudden staccato of a woman’s high heels as she hurried down the sidewalk: he couldn’t cry out, he hardly knew if he wanted to. There was nothing else to see, just that single scrap of blue. Like wings, or the sail of a ship. He’d move but it hurt.

The sky was clogged with clouds like soapsud scum in dirty dishwater and he wouldn’t have screamed anyway and there was going to be an _afterwards_ after all.

And him lost and bloodied and hurting, and abruptly out of context.

He had become an it: that at least didn’t surprise him. It was just what happened when you killed.

He had been taken and used, and finally broken, and cast carelessly aside. Like a – he’d heard it said enough times, that bodies looked like large and damaged dolls. He’d never thought it a good analogy but he felt like junk all the same, like the pointlessly poignant debris found strewn across grassland or tarmac at the scene of an accident, or the scene of a crime. A scrawled obscenity on a crumbling wall.

(He didn’t, of course, look like anything of the sort. He looked like a person, a badly wounded person. Like a victim.)

And, though he knew it, somehow he was thinking of nothing of the sort. Somehow, it didn’t matter in the least. The only thing that mattered was that he wanted to go home and he couldn’t, and the trapped fabric twisted and writhed in the breeze and a skein of birds threaded across the sky and it meant nothing, nothing at all.


	2. Cubicle 7

Six ten and a train pulling out, and a clutter of commuters spilling from the station exit and out into the quiet streets. The sky hung heavy with clouds, dour gray and menacing; the sun, sinking low on the horizon, sulked behind them, a few feeble rays of light slanted through the windowpanes of Officer Matsuda’s police box at precisely the wrong angle. It left him squinting when he peered out into the street, rudely revealing the dust that clung to shelves and surfaces. His wife would, he was sure, be sighing at the inconsiderate light: he could clearly picture her clicking her tongue and reaching for dusters and polish. She might have stepped into the room behind him, then leant over to wipe the film of dust from the top of his computer screen.

Thinking of Naomi made him less tolerant of the dust and he wiped it away himself, frowning slightly.

Behind his back Araki frowned her way through a telephone call, Sugihara chewed a toothpick and fingered the evening paper. It had been a quiet kind of day, or so he had heard. A stolen bicycle, a stray cat, a little girl who’d found a purse and a lost tourist asking, in faltering Japanese, if anyone knew where to find the Tachibana Hotel. Everyday things.

It was a quiet kind of job, but Yuuichi Matsuda was a quiet kind of soul, possessing all the patient competence of a man who had missed out on promotion only by proving far too good at his job. The very image of a neighborhood patrolman, he might have stepped, tall and sturdy and cheerful, out of the pages of a children’s book: Mr. Policeman in _People We Meet_. We won’t, he would say to the rookies when they complained, save the world doing this job, but we can at least make it a little bit nicer. It would have sounded corny from the sergeant but Officer Matsuda would say it like he meant it, with the smile of a man who understood the importance of the little things. The distinction was surprisingly important.

“Honestly,” Araki said as she put down the phone, “do we _look_ like a left-luggage office?”  
“You’d be amazed what people think we look like,” Sugihara said, and turned another page.

Matsuda simply chuckled, low and indulgent, and shook his head.

It was only when Mrs. Yamazaki rounded the corner, walking quickly as if fearful it would rain, that he realized he hadn’t seen her or her husband all evening. She should have been a familiar sight but – what’s wrong with this picture? – there was something strange about her, something indefinably off. Frowning, Matsuda stepped from the police box.

“No husband this evening?”

The woman jerked at the sound of his voice, her head snapping up. Strange that she should be out without a coat—

“Officer Matsuda!” She sounded breathless.

She was starting forward now, hurrying toward him – almost at a run. (Where was the dog? The husband was explicable though far from usual, but for her to be out without the dog, well! _That_ simply didn’t seem—) Matsuda took a pace backward, hands raised for fear she would stumble or fall, or run into him: she did none of those things. She stopped short a few feet from him, and though her cheeks were flushed with exertion, her skin was pale.

“Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said, “is something the matter?”  
“Officer,” she said again. Breathing hard still, her shoulders shaking. “Officer, you’ve… call an ambulance.”  
“Is your husband all—”  
“It’s not him!” She spoke urgently. “Not him. There’s been, there’s this—” She broke off, looked away, shook her head. “Oh, Lord, I can’t, I can’t say. I…“  
And there was fear there, but there was also embarrassment. Clearly this was no conversation to be having in public. “Why don’t you come inside?” Matsuda suggested. “You can tell us your story there.”

Officer Araki must have been watching them through the glass: the girl was already scrambling to her feet as he guided Mrs. Yamazaki into a folding chair. Matsuda nodded to her as she disappeared into the back room, reappearing a few seconds later carrying a mug of cold water, which she pressed into Mrs. Yamazaki’s hands. Hovering, she watched as the woman sipped, swallowed, her hands shaking. Wrong, all wrong for a woman who was always so neat and composed: why should she have a run in her hose, or brick dust caught in her graying hair?

“Now, Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said gently, taking the mug from her, “what’s this about needing an ambulance?”  
The woman glanced about herself, sly and furtive: another flurry of schoolgirls and secretaries and salarymen slipped quickly past the police box’s windows like puppets in a shadow-play. “My husband’s at the old surgery,” she said finally. “There’s…” She swallowed, visibly steeling herself. “Momo ran inside. There’s someone in there, and – and they’re hurt.”  
“Badly hurt?”  
“Yes, they’ve, they were… she slipped her leash and just ran inside, she wouldn’t come out. My husband called and called but she wouldn’t and she always comes for him, we thought she must have been… well, we – we had to go in, didn’t we? You can’t just leave a dog in a place like that, and there they were. Just lying there, and—oh, God, Momo must have picked up the scent. My husband told me to go for help.”  
“You did the right thing, Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said: the woman smiled, visibly relaxing, and she shouldn’t have needed to be told but somehow they always did. Out of the corner of his eye, Matsuda saw Sugihara reaching for the telephone, then hesitate like an actor waiting to be fed a cue, his hand outstretched: a single nod and he was picking up the receiver and dialing. “Where is your husband now? Is he still with her?”  
Mrs. Yamazaki hesitated. She said, “No.”  
“Where is he then? Did he go for—”  
“No, it’s…” Mrs. Yamazaki flushed, twisting her fingers together. “I mean yes, he’s still there. But it’s not a woman. It’s a boy.”

 

The old surgery had still been a busy little dental practice when Matsuda was assigned to the neighborhood. It was a small, affair run by a single man, the gray-haired and grumpy Doctor Tokuno, his daughter doubling as nurse and receptionist. Not long after Matsuda’s arrival, however, a new, large clinic opened, hitting the old man’s business hard. His daughter married, fell pregnant: her replacement lasted less than a year, driven away by Tokuno’s carping resentment and constant fault-finding, seduced by modern equipment and higher pay. The old man had been felled by a stroke not long afterward.

Doctor Tokuno lingered on in a nursing home. His surgery stood abandoned, gradually and gracefully falling into ruin.

The wonder, Matsuda thought as he parked his bicycle by the damaged cyclone fencing that surrounded the building, was that nothing of the sort had happened before. The old surgery, its walls stained and slowly crumbling, its paths cracked and its yard overgrown with weeds, had been fenced off years back but all that had done was make it look more alluring. Curious children, spooking one another with stories of phantom dentists, slipped inside from time to time: their older siblings too, looking for trouble or a place to lie down. Sugihara had chased a couple out little more than a fortnight back, neither of them more than fifteen. Still, you’d have to be pretty hard up for privacy before the Tokuno surgery started to look appealing.

And now this. (They ought to tear this place down.) It would be a kid, most like. He’d seen that before, too many times. Kids messing round where they knew they shouldn’t be taking fright and fleeing when a friend was injured, and too afraid of the consequences to tell their parents what had happened. Kids, or a teenage misfit, dragged here by his classmates.

Odd that no child had been reported missing, though.

Six twenty-two by Matsuda’s watch and the sky quite gray now: the policeman hurried up the pathway, shoulders hunched against the wind, the grass whispering and susurrating all about him. The door, blue-painted and peeling, stood unlocked.

Stepping over the threshold, Matsuda found himself in a small, cramped corridor leading into a waiting area. Peering about the door he could see paint peeling like dry skin from the clammy walls, the ceiling mottled with mold. Chairs, some toppled onto their sides, some bleeding stuffing, still lined the room, a sheaf of magazines, models in clothing and hairstyles almost a decade out of date smiling vacantly up from their covers, lay moldering on a central table: amazing what got shut up in places like this, what just got left behind when the doors closed and lay forgotten thereafter. The carpet looked verdant, the air smelt of damp and rot. There was absolutely nothing there.

“Police,” he called. “Is anyone here?”  
“Hello?” The response was instantaneous. A man calling from further within the building, his voice firm and not yet tremulous with age, his words followed by a flurry of barking – “ _quiet_ ,” the man said, “quiet, Momo. We’re around the back, officer!”

Back out into the darkened hallway. Matsuda hurried past a small, untidy room which must once have been an office (chaos in there: record cards spilling out across the floor and a typewriter, its hammers clogged with rust, resting forlornly in the center of an empty desk) and out through an invitingly open door with a single frosted-glass panel, into—

“Thank goodness you’re here,” said Mr. Yamazaki, and his eyes, trapped behind his round-framed spectacles, were fearful.

A quiet kind of disarray. Though the dentist’s chair still sat smugly in the center of the treatment room and sinks and cabinets still lined the walls, the windows were glassless, the rear walls crumbling and tumbledown and the roof, in places, entirely gone. From the front, the old surgery still looked like a building: cut the lawns and clean up the paintwork and it would look much the same as it had in Doctor Tokuno’s day. From the back, however, it was little more than a ruin: the building was wounded, already half-destroyed. They really, Matsuda thought numbly, ought to tear this place down.

It should have been a woman: it appalled him that he should have thought so. Of course, he wouldn’t have wanted a young girl to have suffered—it was only that (this simply isn’t reasonable) a woman would have been _understandable_.

(This doesn’t happen to men, surely. Not like this.)

The boy was naked. Bleeding, bruised, barely clinging to consciousness, he lay on his back with his hands thrown above his head, legs splayed and bent at the knee. He had been left gagged with a thick strip of stained blue fabric, and a length of coarse rope was still tied loosely about one wrist: though his hands were unbound, he hadn’t tried to tug the gag from his mouth. His right arm looked painfully _wrong_.

“Son,” Matsuda said tentatively. “Son, can you hear me?”

Nothing. Not even a flicker of the eyes. The boy lay still, and silent, and utterly unreachable: that was the worst of it.

And with a woman it would have been different. Expected, even. There would have been procedures to follow, a protocol. There would have been female officers and specialists to call in, support groups. With a woman, it would have been serious. But now? Now there was nothing. Only him, and a boy who should have been a girl and shouldn’t have been there at all, an aging man with worry in his eyes and a little terrier with a little child’s name – and the unspoken expectation that Mr. Policeman, fine and upstanding and ready to help, would know what to do and could somehow make everything better.

But it didn’t work like that and it never had done, and it certainly wouldn’t now. Matsuda reached for his radio, fumbled the switch: his fingers felt thick and clumsy and foreign. “Matsuda here,” he said: his voice, at least, was as calm and clear as always. “I’m going to need backup.”

 

The boy struggled when they came for him.

One of the ambulancemen had placed their hand on his shoulder: that was how it started. A nothing of a gesture, meaning nothing at all – an offhanded, almost thoughtless attempt to offer reassurance. He must have felt the boy tensing, heard him inhale sharp and sudden and even that sounded like it should have hurt him. After that he lay still, stubbornly silent and passively uncooperative, yet somehow watchful: though the boy’s eyes were unfocused and heavy-lidded, something in them spoke only of his wariness. It was only when they made to move him that he tried to resist.

God knew what he thought was happening; obvious what he assumed. They touched him and he screamed, and his scream was hoarse and weak and wordless, torn from him through nothing but terror. He screamed and tried to shrink from them, to pull away and struggle to rise: when pain held him fast he lashed out, clawing at the arms and the faces of the men who clustered about him. (Leave me alone. Leave me alone, God damn you.) Fear in his eyes.

It took four of them to hold him down so the paramedics could sedate him.

Better they’d killed him, the old detective said, and resignedly shook his head. Easier all round, and probably kinder—

“Are you sure that was his?” his clean-cut young partner asked.  
The old detective spared him a wry smile. “I can’t see a criminal leaving this on him, never mind going round in an apron.”  
“Huh,” The young man said. “Silly kind of thing to call a store…”

He fought the drug, too, as desperately and hopelessly as he had twisted beneath the hands that pinned him down. Stark terror on his face as he felt the sudden sting of the needle and his eyes, as they fell closed, were a study in despair. After that it was easy.

The police had arrived in silence; the ambulance though had deployed its siren, drawing attention to itself. By the time the ambulance crew left the building the clutter of vehicles stood about the pavement around the old surgery had drawn the usual crowd of extras, commuters in suits or high-school uniforms, and quizzical children, and here and there a housewife in a kerchief or a pinafore, all watching wide-eyed over nothing at all and heedless of the distant grumble of thunder, the parched and dusty sidewalk spotted with the first heavy droplets of rain. A sudden ripple of murmuring greeted the reappearance of the paramedics, diligently struggling with a laden gurney, a portable cylinder of oxygen.

“What’s his name?” one of the ambulancemen asked, before they took him away.  
The young detective only shrugged. “Apparently he’s a florist.”  
____

It wasn’t, of course, new to her.

Senior Staff Nurse Madoka Mori had short dark hair, plump forearms and the placid brown eyes and brisk demeanor of the professionally sensible. Always a grave child, her natural tendency toward practicality had been honed by her time at nursing college, refined by walking the wards, a calm and uncomplaining figure, cool in pristine white, and perfected by seven years spent in emergency rooms. Nobody knew how she stayed so tidy, for she was certainly not a vain woman. Even Madoka herself professed to be mystified.

It had been one of those days, the same kind she had every day. A sweating salaryman with crushing central chest pain, his tie at half-mast; an old woman with a fractured femur found on the floor of her bathroom by the home help; an overdosing schoolgirl pronounced dead on arrival; a traffic accident. Amazing how quickly the life-altering could become only mundane.

Everyday things, for Nurse Mori, consisted of little more than other people’s tragedies and near-misses, with brushes with death that left them shaking and terrified. She glided through it all cool and white and serene as a swan: it was only on stepping from the unit and unpinning the cap from her head that she would realize how tired she felt and notice, as if for the first time, the marks of subtle strain about her mouth, the careworn look in her eyes. You’re no longer young, Madoka, she would think. She would wonder if her mother was right, if it was time to leave the ER and find a quiet, ordinary job elsewhere; she would think about children as she shrugged on her coat and hurried home to prepare her husband’s dinner.

She never would make the decision to leave. Deep down, Madoka Mori knew she didn’t really want to go anywhere.

“What’s he been given?”

The nurses had a name for the cubicles: they called them _traps_. Mean and cluttered little things, they were, inadequately split off from one another and screened from the corridor by nothing more substantial than a thin curtain made of woven white paper, offering only a parodic form of privacy and whose only true virtue was infinite disposability. Nurse Mori had been overseeing a patient transfer, escorting her forlorn and crumpled salaryman four floors to the coronary care unit, and had barely stepped back into the ER before the charge nurse hurried her over to cubicle seven. She barely had time to ask what the problem was before he was turning from her again, all his attention on an approaching doctor.

Eighteen year old male, he had said over one shoulder, as if it were merely an afterthought. Query sexual assault—and already he had slipped from her reach.

What was there for her to do but to see to it? Nurse Mori had sighed, shaken her head, schooled a reassuring little semi-smile onto her face. (Some things even familiarity didn’t make easier. First the overdosing girl, still trim in her middle school uniform, now this – thank God she had tomorrow off.) She stepped over to the cubicle and slipped neatly inside, the paper curtain swinging to behind her.

If surprise was what she felt, Nurse Mori knew better than to show it.

“What’s he been given?”

For the boy – and somehow it was difficult to think of the patient in cubicle seven as anything but a boy – had clearly been given something. He hardly seemed to feel it when they transferred him to the bed. His eyes opened only momentarily at the jolt, though he shied away when Nurse Mori drew down the sheet that covered him to press the ECG electrodes to his chest. It wasn’t even a surprise to discover he was naked. Easy now, she said, and her voice was soft and murmurous as a lullaby. You’re in hospital. You’re safe.

It would make a difference, she knew, that she was a woman: Nurse Mori made a mental note to request that the boy be examined by a female physician. The curtains billowed slightly as someone hurried past, pushing an overloaded gurney with a single squeaking wheel.

“We gave him ten milligrams of diazepam,” the ambulanceman was saying: he at least possessed the good sense to look sheepish, wilting slightly in the face of Nurse Mori’s obvious disapprobation. “He was panicking.”  
“That,” Nurse Mori said, “isn’t really a good indication for sedation.” There was no malice in her voice – she simply stated a fact. (We don’t sedate just to make our own lives easier. Of _course_ he was panicking!)

Tugging the sheet back over the boy, she turned her back on the paramedic to watch the cardiac monitor, checking the alarm limits. Blood pressure was a bit low: they’d have to watch that, though it could mean nothing. This boy looked the athletic type. Do you play sports, she wanted to ask, but what would the point of that be? She spared the stupid ambulanceman another reproachful glance. Now how were they supposed to get anything out of this young man?

“He’s on two liters of oxygen,” the ambulanceman was saying, talking a little too quickly as if hoping to dissuade her from questioning him further. “Saturating at ninety-eight percent on that, and we started him on one liter of normal saline in the ambulance, that’s to run four hourly. The doctors said to ask someone on your staff to write him up for more, he’s probably going to need it.”  
“Painkillers?” Nurse Mori asked, and even to her own ears her words had sounded horribly pointed. It would be just like a fool like this to sedate his patient and forget to give him anything for the pain.  
“He’s had five milligrams of morphine, so far.”  
“Thank you.” Nurse Mori took the ambulance paperwork from the man, gave him a brief, placatory smile. (I’m only looking out for my patient. Surely you understand that?) “I’ll get a doctor to add that to his drug chart. Is there anything else?”

No, nothing else, or nothing that she couldn’t have guessed for herself. Just an inventory of abuse, and exposure, and dehydration, and a possible contact number and that was only for the boy’s supposed workplace. What was his name? The paramedic didn’t know.

She was glad when the man took his leave, leaving her alone with her patient, and beneath the blood and the bruising the poor child looked only terribly young. (No, it never gets easier. Who _did_ this to you, honey? How did you get into this state?) Nurse Mori called to a passing probationer to fetch towels and a hospital gown, and an extra blanket. The boy lay still, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Just breathing, and just to breathe seemed to tear at him. In the distance, somewhere beneath the bleep and the hiss of machinery, the hum of voices and the constant patter of footfalls, she thought she could hear someone screaming.

Madoka Mori didn’t relish the thought of the phone call she knew she would have to make one bit.

(She could, she supposed, stave it off for a while, in the hope that the boy would snap out of it at least enough to give his name – but if she left it too late there’d be nobody to take the call, not in a flower shop.)

The student slipped in through the curtain, her arms laden with folded fabric: she stopped short when she caught sight of the boy, her eyes going wide, her lips parting as if to frame a question – Nurse Mori shook her head, no, and the girl colored slightly, murmuring an apology as she dropped the blankets onto the end of the bed and went to fill a large plastic bowl with water. _Doctor Terada_ , a calm female voice said over the intercom, _please report to resus. Doctor Terada to resus_ —

“Do you need me to stay, Nurse Mori?”  
The woman nodded briskly, tugging on a pair of latex gloves. “Could you lower the bed head, please? We need to get him cleaned up, at least.”

Up close the boy smelled of the outdoors, of damp and of dust and of cold as well as blood, and spent fear.

And him too weary to struggle, or constrained by agony, or beyond terror, or stupefied by the drugs: she couldn’t tell what. All Nurse Mori knew was the boy didn’t try to fight her. He didn’t try to do anything, didn’t even protest, or at least not in words. He merely flinched when she ran a damp washcloth over one bruised cheek – it came away stained and bloody, smeared with red – and tried to draw in on himself, the breath hissing in sharp between clenched teeth. (Awareness filtering back: the boy opened his eyes again, just slightly, just enough for her to notice even his eyes looked torn, damaged, _wrong_.) Careful as she had tried to be, she knew that she had hurt him. Would not be able to avoid hurting him still further.

A thin film of grime collected at the bottom of the bowl. The student, pale-cheeked and clumsy, changed the water, changed it again: her hands shook as she turned the boy onto his side, felt him tense beneath her grasp. Nurse Mori worked quickly, conscious of the student’s frightened eyes upon her. Assessing, categorizing, wringing out the washcloth into the filthy water. Contusions and lacerations to the chest; abrasions about the neck and jaw, erythemia already darkening to a bruise; right radius either fractured or broken; rope burns at the extremities; perineal trauma—

The boy’s injuries were an indictment in themselves. He shivered when they stripped away the bedsheets and, shivering, tried to hide his face in the pillows.

“It’s okay,” Nurse Mori said, over and over and over again. “You’re in hospital. You’re safe.”

And it was awkward, and fumbling, and somehow far too intimate a thing to do to a hurt and vulnerable stranger: it always was, always had been. Familiarity merely anesthetized her to it. No wonder the boy’s breath caught in his throat, no wonder he tensed and fought against her in the only way left to him, offering nothing but mute and furious non-compliance. It was resistance of a kind, and it left her sweating and agitated as she fought to tug the gown over his stiff, heavy limbs.

Stop this at once, she wanted to say, sharp as a schoolmistress. I’m trying to _help_ you, you stupid child—

She couldn’t blame him for a minute for refusing to believe it. And she would be hurting him: that much was unavoidable.

It was a relief to turn from him, stoop to collect her paperwork and flick quickly through it. A relief, though she hated, even to herself, to admit it, to reduce him to a tentative diagnosis, a series of numbers scribbled in black ink: pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure. Eighteen year old male, query sexual assault – easier to deal with that way.

Lost, she thought. Poor kid, he looks so lost. (Someone must have missed you, honey. Surely they must.) The boy lay on his back, gazing vacantly up at the ceiling as the student rearranged the bedsheets and nervously fingered the IV tubing: the set of his jaw was a subtle betrayal of agony. The girl stepped anxiously away as Nurse Mori glanced over at her, clasping her hands before her apron as if she had been caught doing something she knew she shouldn’t. She – _I’ll need you to stay with him_ – looked like a child playing dress-up, and barely less forlorn than her patient.

She spared the probationer a smile as, her arms full of papers, she turned back to the boy and bent to him – it was an effort to stop herself from talking his hand. Who _are_ you?

“Is there anyone you want me to call? Your family? Perhaps a friend?”

Nothing. He didn’t appear to have heard. He simply gazed up at the ceiling, his wounded eyes unfocused and fixed upon nothing at all, as if it held something fascinating—

“What’s your name?” Nurse Mori asked, and her voice was soft, her tone was hopeful. “Can you tell me that?”  
The boy stirred. His eyes slipped sideways, as if he were searching for her face, and he blinked – once, twice – snatching for focus. He swallowed, and winced. He said, and his voice was little more than a hoarse and painful whisper, “Siberian.”  
“Excuse me?” The woman frowned. (Had she heard that right?) “I’m terribly sorry, I don’t think I…”  
“My name,” said Ken Hidaka, “is Siberian.”

And let his eyes close, and felt himself falling.


	3. The Naming of Cats

Eight twenty-five. On top of everything else he had chosen quite the wrong hospital, and Youji couldn’t help but feel that somehow said everything a guy would have ever needed to know about Ken Hidaka.

His hair was wet. The driving rain whipped at his cheeks, and left his curls hanging dark and heavy about his face. Raindrops corrugated the surface of the pond; trees, their leaves slick and heavy, bowed beneath the weight of the water. The hospital loomed up from behind a veil of rain, blank-faced and monumental as something out of a movie, the light that shone harsh and cold from its windows somehow only making it look all the more forbidding. Youji shivered, and told himself it was from the chill: how to explain, then, why he lingered by the pond, watching the play of the lights on the glazed streets?

Cars grumbled on the clogged avenue, their headlights smears upon the paving; a pair of doctors sulked by the hospital doors, cigarettes in hand. Youji half-turned at the sudden _tick_ of a woman’s footsteps as a young office worker, a sodden evening paper held over her dark and glossy head, scuttled past on impractical heels. He wondered who she was here for.

(And dread, heavy and unyielding as a stone: his stomach curled like a clenched fist.)

 _I'm terribly sorry to bother you so late in the day_ – and he’d thought the voice, distorted by the telephone, sounded familiar. Had thought it was an ex at first, or a prospective girlfriend, a bold young woman hopefully canvassing for a date – _but we've a young man in our emergency department who has no ID save for a receipt from your store_ —

And Youji had thought only, oh, God. What’s he gotten himself into this time? Like a parent, wearied by a wayward son.

— _I appreciate this may sound peculiar, but has your friend ever called himself 'Siberian'?_

Then the fear. He felt disconnected. He thought of the word estranged. The rain crawled slow and cold and ticklish down his cheeks, the nape of his neck, like a finger: he hadn’t trusted himself to drive. This place had nothing to do with any of them.

It was the wrong hospital. Not their hospital, the police hospital, which would know how to deal with them: it would have to, what with the sister tucked neatly away in her clean and clinical cell. The wrong place and the wrong time and just how much trouble could Ken have gotten into, anyway, on an afternoon off? His condition is stable, the stranger on the telephone had said: they both knew all she meant was _please be careful_. I told him, Youji thought uselessly, I _told_ him he rode that bike too fast—he didn’t know it was the bike’s fault and almost hoped it wasn’t: Ken loved that bike. He didn’t know anything. He only knew that, somehow, Ken had been hurt, and here he was with a sports bag full of Ken’s possessions. That was all.

Ken's in hospital, he had told Aya, giving the man nothing but a newsreader’s cold neutrality: Ken could have been anyone to him, or nobody. Saint Luke’s.

I’ll call Omi, Aya had said.

Don’t, Youji had heard himself say, smiling helplessly in the face of Aya’s confusion, understated yet obvious. Just don’t.

Even at the time he didn’t know why he’d said it. He certainly didn’t know why now when it would only cause trouble for all of them, when he wished Omi were here, not sequestered at a study group, oblivious. Omi, small and trim and – no matter how fearful he may have been feeling - and always _competent_ , carrying with him the belief (and it was infectious and, in their line of work, essential) that whatever their situation was, it could be handled and there was a way out. The solution would be there, it was simply a matter of knowing where to look – but there was something steel-cold and unyielding about Omi’s intellect, his ability to pare life down to the bare minimum. Like it or not Omi saw clearly. Something in the child’s eyes murmured that he was far older than seventeen, and not to be underestimated.

All wrong for the situation. Look beyond the boy’s wide blue eyes and ostensibly open countenance and there was a – call it a _particularity_ about Omi, something all insinuation and dangerous currents and nowhere near as benign as simple concern. He was an intelligent boy, a force to be reckoned with; Youji was deeply grateful they were on the same side, but one thing Omi Tsukiyono could never be was normal. He didn’t know how to be.

If Omi were here they would have been inside by now. He wouldn’t have been hovering on a lip of concrete, gazing up at the lighted windows of the wrong hospital. Omi would have touched him on the shoulder, and said his name, and tried to smile: come on, Youji-kun. He would have walked in; he would have been calm and matter-of-fact and quietly furious; he would have effortlessly taken charge. He wouldn’t have known what else to do, or how else he was supposed to cope…

But Youji (—or if he’s dying or crippled or if I don’t recognize him, I don’t think I could handle that but you’ve got to handle it Youji, he’s strong but not even he’s that strong, oh God let him be all right, _please_ say he’ll be all right in the end—) Youji hesitated, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

The light and the warmth, as he stepped into the reception area, hit him like a wall.

Too bright in there, and too loud, though the lobby was largely empty at this time of day – it was funny, he thought, how the foyers everywhere all looked essentially the same: it hardly mattered what the business behind them thought it was up to. A bank, an airline, an embassy, a hospital. All presenting themselves to the world in wide, bare sweeps of shining floor tiles, high ceilings, an obligatory echo and an interesting way with lights, dazzling or gloomy, take your pick. A desk with a young woman behind it: a scrubbed and smiling and standardized, assembly-line beauty so similar to every other receptionist that it left Youji wondering if, somewhere, there was a factory that churned them out like that.

“Excuse me.”

The girl behind the information desk looked up, gave him a smile that seemed entirely genuine: Youji caught a brief flash of too-white teeth as she dimpled charmingly, but the why of it didn’t really register. Here and now this girl simply didn’t exist to him, except as a means to an end.

“Can I help at all, sir?”  
“Yes. I,” Youji said, and somehow the words seemed to catch at him, “need to find the emergency department.”  
The girl blinked. (But you don’t _look_ sick.) “If you’re feeling unwell,” she said, gesturing vaguely to something behind her, “the walk-in clinic is on your right – it’s past the escalators, you won’t be able to see it from here.”  
“It’s not me. It’s my—” And Youji didn’t have a story for these people. He hadn’t known what he was going to say before he said it, but the lie sprung to his lips so instinctively he might have had it planned long ago: “—cousin. I just got a phone call, the nurse said they’d brought in someone who could be him, but they’re not sure. They asked if I’d come down to – well, to check, I guess.”  
“Oh, I see.” She didn’t sound like she saw. “Did you get the name? The name of the person who called you, I mean.”  
“Mori,” Youji said. “Madoka Mori. She said she was a senior staff nurse.”  
He watched as the girl’s smile changed, and active concern flooded into her warm brown eyes. She was older than him, just slightly. I’m new at this, her demeanor whispered, and sometimes I’m not sure I like it. “Oh yes, I know the woman you mean. The emergency care center’s right next to the walk-in clinic. When you get there, ask to speak to the nurse in charge. He’ll take you to Nurse Mori. I’ll give you a temporary pass…“ Already she was reaching for a pen, bowing her head. “Can I take your name?”

As he walked away he could feel the girl’s eyes on his back, watching him until he slipped from view. Ordinarily he would have known why, but the way things were Youji couldn’t imagine what a pretty young woman could ever have seen in him. Not here. Not now. He couldn’t even manage to smile for her.

It shouldn’t have mattered this much. It was Ken. Only Ken, and he’d been hurt before.

(But this was too strange and too sudden to handle. It was just an afternoon off. He was supposed to be _safe_ , dammit!)

Nobody looked at Youji as he stepped cautiously into the walk-in clinic, finding himself in a large, over-lit waiting area discreetly cluttered with people. Too bright in here, again: the light so harsh it left the knots of people looking washed out, bleached as the figures in an over-exposed photograph. The clinic doors hissed closed behind him.

Youji knew there was no point looking, but looked anyway: extras, just extras. A plump, plain-faced woman, panic bubbling up around the edges of a superficial calm, with a dazed and yawning toddler in flimsy cotton pajamas held upon her lap. A student pacing, pausing, pacing again. Three stained and dusty men, laborers most likely – one mournfully cradling his arm, another pressing a handful of tissues to a bleeding nose. A scattering of salarymen in suits. A brace of girls dressed too gaudily for their clinical surroundings: the prettier of the two pressed a tissue to panda eyes while her friend shifted uneasily beside her. An elderly couple, their hair shot through with gray, side by side on one of the upholstered benches, unspeaking: the wife occasionally pressed her husband’s hand. Neither of them, to Youji’s eyes, looked particularly ill.

It would have been nice to see Ken there, perhaps pressing a piece of gauze to a gash on his brow, frowning and irritated and resenting the fuss that was being made over a single stupid scratch—

Another desk, another girl, yawning and picking at her fingernails with an unbent paperclip. _Rika_ , said her nametag.

“I’m looking for a woman called Madoka Mori.”  
The answer was pat, uninterested. “She’s on duty until nine. If you’ve come to see her, I’ll have to ask you to wait elsewhere.”  
“No, that’s not it,” Youji said. “You see, my cousin…”  
“I’m sorry,” Receptionist Rika said briskly, eagerly snatching hold of the wrong end of the stick and proceeding to beat herself to death with it, “I can’t allow you to jump the queue just because you know Nurse Mori. There’s a lot of other people here already. I can take your cousin’s details, but he’ll have to wait to be seen like everyone else. Of course the waiting time will depend on his condition and I should warn you they’re very busy over in Majors, which has to take priority.”  
“Yes, they think that’s where he is.” Said aloud, it sounded horribly final. “Can you contact Nurse Mori? I’d like to see him.”  
The girl frowned at him. “But we don’t allow visitors in the emergency center. Once he’s admitted to a ward you can—”  
“No, look. It’s very simple. I—” Youji broke off, all patience vanishing, “Can I speak to the nurse in charge please.”

He could tell the girl didn’t want to do it. She’d taken against him on sight: by the look on her face she had realized he wasn’t impressed by her desk or her name badge, and had worked himself up to just the right degree of outraged anxiety to become a persistent problem. Fine then – she was reaching for the telephone, disapproval showing in the set of her shoulders – you can talk to the charge nurse. At least you’ll be off my hands.

“Wait over there, please,” The girl said, gesturing sulkily to the body of the room as she put down the phone. Clearly the call hadn’t gone to her liking. Probably for the best. “He’ll be sending through for you.”  
____

Senior Staff Nurse Madoka Mori turned out to be a neat and compact woman with a calm, reassuring demeanor. Though her dark eyes were weary, she was still disarmingly handsome and just to gaze at her left Youji painfully aware of how bedraggled he must have been looking. She bowed, smiled at him, offered an apology for the delay he hadn’t really noticed (something about a doctor) and said something rote and reassuring: caught off-guard by the bustle and the clamor all about him, Youji didn’t really catch any of it. He said, can I see him?

Nurse Mori nodded, _of course_ , but she didn’t take him there straight away. First she led him from the cluttered nurse’s station and down a cramped, cubicle-lined corridor just wide enough to accommodate a gurney. She led him into an empty cubicle, stepping aside to allow him to pass by then, drawing the curtains, invited him to take a seat. Youji stood.

“Just how bad is it?” he asked.  
Nurse Mori looked away, eyes downcast. “His condition remains stable but you should be aware,” she said, “that your—”  
“Cousin.”  
“Your cousin, thank you. Should this patient turn out to be your cousin,” Ken, Youji thought, his name is Ken, “please be aware that, though he can at times appear conscious, he may not respond to you. His condition is rather…” She hesitated, just slightly – she had dropped the thread of the conversation, and fumbled to pick it up again. She’d seen this before, but not often, not often enough to get used to it. She shifted her weight as he watched: not, he could tell, in embarrassment, but as if her feet were sore. “Rather _particular_.”  
“Particular,” Youji echoed, as if the word meant nothing. “What do you mean by that?”  
“I’m afraid I can’t explain further. We have to maintain confidentiality, and we’ve yet to confirm his identity. All I can tell you is there are strong grounds to believe the patient in question was the victim of a serious criminal assault.”

Criminal assault. The woman was blushing. Down the corridor something started chiming, soft and insistent. There’s a boy here who’s been raped, and they think it’s Ken—

Ridiculous.

Nurse Mori said, “I’m terribly sorry, sir.” And God help the both of them, she actually sounded it. “But it would have been remiss of me not to tell you first.”  
“No,” Youji said: it was an effort to fight back a laugh. This was ridiculous, this couldn’t be Ken. Eight forty and Ken would be back home now, boiling the kettle in the kitchen, complaining to anyone who’d put up a pretense of listening about the driving rain and slick, treacherous roads, wondering where in the Hell _he’d_ gotten to: anyone could get a store receipt and they called Ken average for a reason. “I understand. Can I see him?”

The nurse stepped back, drew aside the cubicle curtain. It was, Youji supposed, as good a response as any. Strange, that small courtesy, the way she had stepped aside to allow him to leave first, when he would need her to lead the way to—

No, it was absurd. This couldn’t be him, it didn’t make sense that it would be. It couldn’t be possible. Sure Ken didn’t look like much, but he was good at what he did: even if Youji could imagine anyone other than an armed professional taking Ken down, which he couldn’t really, this was – no, it was a typo, a category error. It simply wasn’t reasonable. There had to be another explanation, an innocent one. The weather. The roads. _Ken_?

(Has your friend ever called himself Siberian?)

He stopped short. Nurse Mori was hesitating beside the closed curtain of one of the cubicles: it was the final bizarre touch to a situation he could barely believe in as it was. And now, tonight’s mystery guest—he laughed, and it sounded strange and strained and somehow wrong, and all Nurse Mori did was watch him. Not judging, not blaming – she wasn’t even surprised.

All she said was, “This is the patient.”

Youji (and, on cold reflection, he could hardly explain even to himself why he had expected it) imagined she would pull the curtain aside, but she didn’t. Nurse Mori simply parted it slightly and held it open, just a little, in a silent invitation to step inside: he could see nothing, only a slice of bare, white-painted wall and a storage unit made of strong clear plastic, drawers full to bursting, and a scrap of white material (a square of gauze? A disposable washcloth?) on the scuffed, dully shining floor. Okay, Kudou, ready or not…

“You want me to go in?” Youji asked, half-hoping she would tell him no.  
“If you don’t mind.”

Ready or not. Youji smiled, as if to show it didn’t really matter: Nurse Mori smiled back, helplessly, because she knew it did.

And it felt like looking at a stranger, anyway.

Broken and distant and somehow diminished – too young and too small and too pale to be anybody Youji should have been able to recognize. He looked like an afterthought, lost amongst heavy blankets and overstarched sheets, and pillows, and a clutter of medical paraphernalia, IVs and monitoring equipment, and an oxygen mask: the hospital gown they had dressed him in looked far too large for him and only diminished him further. Somehow, his injuries (the split skin of his cheek held together with paper stitches; one arm stiff in a heavy cast, the other pierced at the wrist by an IV, its tubing snaking pale and grotesque across the covers) only looked all the more ghastly for the half-hearted attempts to patch them up. Even breathing seemed to tear at him and how long is it, Youji wondered, since I last saw him?

A languid, heat-hazy afternoon with the air still and heavy, thick with the promise of thunder and _just so you know_ , Ken said, snatching the delivery receipt from between Aya’s poised fingers and stuffing it into the pocket of his apron, _you owe me for this, Fujimiya_. And he’d hefted the crate of flowers and (don’t expect me back) slipped from their reach, pausing in the shop doorway to settle the crate more comfortably against his hip, smiling back at them and raising one hand in silent farewell. He said simply, _later_ , and walked away into—

“It’s him,” Youji said.

Nurse Mori suggested he sit down again and this time he did, slumping heavily into a hard, straight-backed chair left by the bedside, a relic of the doctor’s visit.

“You can touch him,” she said, “if you like. Holding his hand won’t do him any harm.”  
Youji swallowed. Tried to make himself look away, look up at the woman – he couldn’t. He said, “Do you think he’d like that?”  
“I’m sure,” Nurse Mori said again, “it won’t do him any harm.”

And just to touch seemed like an imposition. Gently, cautiously, Youji reached for Ken and, though it was wrong, all wrong that it should have been so, it was no surprise at all Ken's skin felt cold. Youji sighed and – oh, _Kenken_ , what am I going to do about you? – rubbed his hand, trying to coax the warmth back into it: Ken's fingers tightened around his own, clasping his hand almost hard enough to hurt. Youji flinched slightly, lips parting as if to frame a question, only to catch himself. Though his grasp was taut and urgent, Ken lay still, perfectly silent – yet wary and watchful and far more _there_ than Youji would ever had realized, had he not chosen to let him in on it…

“What’s his name?” the woman asked delicately after a time Youji never counted had passed in silence, punctuated by the sound of hurrying feet, a bubble of clipped and urgent conversation: _totally shut down, unresponsive to filling – query general sepsis_ — The curtain rippled and swayed in their wake.  
Youji started, raising his head, furtive and guilty as a boy caught daydreaming in class. “What?”  
“Your cousin’s name,” Nurse Mori said again. Softly, and gently as if he were the wounded one. “You understand that we’re going to have to admit him.”  
“Kensuke.” Youji spoke numbly. “He’s called Kensuke.” Kensuke, he thought, who the Hell is that?

You’ve got to stop him giving his name, Aya had said before he left. But how would he know to respond to anything else?

My name is Siberian—God knew where Ken had thought he was and this woman hadn’t even questioned it. Probably heard stranger things from patients drugged into stupor or half out of their minds from pain. Perhaps it had been a blessing Ken had given his codename. At least that meant nothing unless one knew what it meant already, it could be explained away only too easily. He was overmedicated, or delirious, or maybe just young. Better that than the name of a dead man.

“Kensuke,” Nurse Mori said: there was relief in her voice as she reached for a ballpoint. “And the family name?”  
“Hidaka.” It was taking a chance and he knew it, but Ken had enough to worry about without keeping an alias straight. Bear with me on this one, Ken. “He’s nineteen.”  
“And his parents? Do you have their address?”  
“Dead. House fire.” _Oh, of course_ , the woman’s eyes said, _the scars_ : exactly why Youji had said it. “We took him in, but my parents went up north… mother’s not well, she can’t travel, and this—” He broke off. “I don’t want to worry her.”  
Nurse Mori nodded. “Well,” she said reassuringly, “for practical purposes we can say you’re the next of kin. I would suggest you inform them, you don’t have to say why Hidaka-san is in hospital, but – anyway, I’ll need some details.”

And did it matter, when the hospital would be happy with anything as long as it looked plausible on paper, if she had the right ones or not?

So Youji smiled, because if he didn’t smile he didn’t know what he might do, and talked to Madoka Mori of a boy who had never existed, the better to conceal the identity of a boy who shouldn’t have existed any more. Watched her nodding in all the right places, trusting him to tell the truth because she couldn’t imagine why he would do otherwise, watched the furrow of her brow and the set of her lips, and the nib of her ballpoint as it darted across the pages.

Forgotten, Ken slipped into sleep.

 _-to be continued-_


End file.
